A family saga that begins in the Argentine and ends in the mud holes of France's No Man's Land; a delicate romance dissolved in the political melee of Europe, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a triumph on every level. With sharp-eyed discipline June Mathis adapted Ibáñez's epic novel allowing both a sense of narrative sweep and cinematic detail for the exquisite palette of young director Rex Ingram, like Rudolph Valentino a Mathis discovery. Valentino's depth could be seen along with his star quality in his first major role, as the narcissistic tango dancer and womanizer whose spirit is both tempered and raised by the politics of love in the period before and during the First World War. Early cinema's most aggravated antiwar tract, in searing images of mobilization and mass migration, debauched German aggression and reluctant French heroics, and finally, universal devastation, this is an intimate fresco of war as "an open grave-and as it seems, men stand in it alive."